Jack in the Days
by DannyFenton123
Summary: Apart from a pony, a log cabin in the woods and the war, most of Jack's childhood is a mystery! Occuring right after The Million Dollar Ghost's ending, Danny, in an attempt to learn more about his father, convinces him to share a little of his and Vlad's escapades as children, and, how Jack even became a ghost hunter in the first place.
1. The Question

**As always, if you guys like what you've read in this sample, let me know via a review, follow or favourite so I can see if you guys want more! I hope you enjoy!**

 **NOTE: The main part of this story will not be told in my usual voice; Jack will be the one telling the story. My first person narration could... use some work, but I believe it will turn out to be good!**

 **All or most of Jack's smaller, funny tales are based off real stories!**

"Wow, dad." Danny looked up from the simulation. "If we'd been one second later with that ecto-filtration..."

"Boom!" Jack demonstrated with his hands, a wide, enthusiastic smile on his face. "I know. There are a lot of risks, being a professional ghost hunter like your mother and I!"

"Huh..." Danny was deep in thought. "But, Dad, how did you become a ghost hunter at first? I mean, there weren't any ghosts around until..."

Danny trailed off, looking concernedly at his father. Upon asking the question, Jack's characteristic beaming grin had dropped.

"Dad?" Danny asked concernedly.

"What?" Jack blinked. "How I became a ghost hunter? That's not a story I'd like to tell you, Danny m'boy. It's quite a downer, with none of the cool fighting you kids are used to seeing in your movies."

"What about when you were a kid, though?" Danny asked. "You've never really talked about that."

"I'd love to, Danny, but I'm not a very good storyteller." Jack stood up and opened the fridge, sniffing around for some fudge. "It's your mother who used to read all the bedtime stories."

"Don't you have at least a short story you could tell us? You must have had some sort of adventure."

Jack cast his memory back. "Vlad and I? Oh, we had a lot of adventures in the woods by my log cabin."

Danny leaned forward expectantly as Jack set a plate of fudge on the table, his chair letting out a complaining creak.

"Huh? Oh, not for tonight, son." Jack winked. "But, how about I tell you a little story tomorrow night? The time Vlad and I sold all the school chairs to Dave and the lumberjacks to pay for-"

"To pay for what?" Danny asked, very much invested at this point. Jack tapped his nose.

"Don't want to spoil the story, Danny! You should go to bed... hey, I wonder where Maddie and your sister went."


	2. The Great Bench Heist

**This is based off of a true story. I only bent the details to fit a bit better ;)**

 **Enjoy!**

The next day, Danny was rather sick. At around six o'clock on Sunday morning, he had woken up to shivering and coughing, and couldn't quite get back to sleep. He was reading a book when Maddie came in. After a quick examination, his mother determined that it would be best if he stayed in bed all day. She gave him his medicine, left a phone on the bedside table, in case he needed anything, and went back down to the lab.

Rather disheartened by the thought of being bedridden for a day, on a weekend no less, Danny lay there with his eyes closed in the dark, neither trying to wake up or go to sleep, a period of misery broken periodically with a bout of coughing.

In this mood, Jack found his son. "Hey, Danny?"

"Yeah?" Danny's voice was rather gravelly, on account of a sore throat.

"I'm sorry you're ill, son." Jack tiptoed over to the blinds and opened them, causing Danny to squint. "It must have been that fight yesterday."

"Yeah..." Danny sniffed. "What are you doing in the lab today?"

"Maddie's installing a handle on the inside of the Fenton Weapons Vault." Jack sat on the side of Danny's bed. "She doesn't need my help, so I was thinking that you needed a little cheering up."

"Are you going to tell me about how you stole all the chairs from your school?" Danny piped up hoarsely, already looking a lot more cheerful than he had been mere seconds ago.

"Was that the story I said I'd tell you? Well, here goes, but I told you, I'm not a good storyteller."

"Please?" Danny pleaded.

"Okay!" And so Jack started:

"Back when I was fourteen, I was living in a log cabin in the woods. We lived in a place with a lot of forests, sunny in summer, snow piled up way over our heads in winter; you should'a seen the igloos we built! Your grandfather, grandmother, my brother and I all lived together in that cabin."

"You had a brother?" Danny interjected.

"Yes, Danny. I had a brother three years older than me, called Zack, and we got on pretty well up until he turned sixteen. Then, he went through a teenager phase, avoided most of the family as much as possible and started calling himself – I think he got it from the car shop he used to work at – Chevvy, because he hated how our names rhymed."

"Wait, where's he now?" Danny frowned. "He never comes to visit us."

"That's beside the point." Jack sidestepped the question. "So, this school we went to, Treelore High. It had a rather posh-looking, non-spandex uniform that always used to give me rashes. V-man and I went to that school, except he lived a little closer to it, in the town. The drive for us was around forty minutes, in an old truck.

Anyway, chair selling incident, as most stupid things we did, started with me trying to replicate whatever my brother was doing. Vlad and I caught Chev smoking at the back of the school, with some friends of his."

"Wait, you smoked?" Despite the fact that Danny knew his Dad's generation wasn't as up to speed on the dangers of smoking, it still felt rather shocking.

"All the kids were trying it," Jack explained. "I did try it a couple times, to be cool, but I never got hooked. And that's why smoking is a big no-no in the Fenton family, eh, son?"

"Why would I want to try it?" Danny croaked. "Though at the moment, I sound like a smoker."

"You shouldn't talk so much when you have a sore throat." Jack reached over and ruffled his son's hair. "Where was I? Oh, yes! I'm back on track.

My father didn't give pocket money, and I didn't want to get a job, so I tried pressing Chevvy for some money. He didn't want to give me anything, and was probably even less willing when he heard that I was going to use the money to copy him. I can still remember him saying to me, 'Smoking's bad,' leaning on the back wall of the school with a cigarette between two of his fingers.

Vlad's parents used to give him pocket money, but it was strictly regulated by them; he used to have to bring back receipts and notes to show them what he spent on every little thing. They were a more modern sort of family as well, ahead of their time and already suspicious that smoking wasn't a good thing. So of course, they forbade old V-man from buying any of that."

"Didn't you say something about a lumberjack, dad?"

"I'm getting to that! Oh, yes. Dave was a former friend of mine at school, whose dad was a lumberjack. When I talked to him about my problem, he told me that his dad needed a whole lot of chairs for this new order. He and I came up with this plan that if I went and got the chairs from the assembly hall - which the school hardly ever used – and carted them across town to his house, Dave's dad would probably pay good money instead of having to make them all by himself."

"So, that's what you did?" Danny frowned. "Didn't anybody think it was weird?"

"I guess not." Jack shrugged. "It was very easy to nick the chairs because they never locked the hall. Vladdie and I didn't get stopped once as we carried two chairs – one in each arm – every few times before and after school to Dave's house. I get the feeling now that Dave's dad was sort of shady; once we explained the situation to him, he didn't seem to have any problems buying chairs that weren't his.

But Vlad and I were happy enough, getting short-changed about a twentieth of the chair's worth, which we promptly spent on cigarettes, fudge and the like. This continued on for two or so weeks, and by the end we'd nearly completely cleared the assembly hall."

"What happened?" Danny frowned.

"Well..." Jack grimaced. "There was a school play going on, and it was then discovered that there were barely enough chairs to even fill the front row. On that same day, all the teachers got sent out looking for any suspicious activity, so soon enough Vladdie and I got busted carrying four of the last remaining chairs across town.

Ooh, my father was _not_ pleased with the bill he had to foot; Dave and his dad denied any responsibility, and Vlad's parents insisted that old Vladdy was pressured into doing wrong, so it all fell to the Fentons to pay up."

"Wow." Danny blinked. "That's a, that's a-" Before he could finish his thought, another bout of coughing interrupted him.

"I was a naughty kid." Jack grinned. "You know, that was kind of fun. I should tell you about the lemonade truck tomorrow, but you probably need some rest, to get better for Monday!"

"Not fair." Danny grumbled, but he did recline back into bed. "I hate getting ill on the weekends. Well, at least I got to hear the story!"

"That was fun." Jack backed out of the room. "But sooner or later I'll have to stop before he gets too invested in them."


	3. A Thirst for Lemonade

**Based on a true story. Enjoy! :D**

"Still sick, son?" Jack poked his head into Danny's room the next day to find him in a similar state to yesterday. "I hope this doesn't have anything to do with Monday."

"What? No-" Danny descended into a bout of coughing. "No."

"I didn't so, Danny." Jack was carefully making his way over to the other side of the room, so as to open the blinds. "Us Fentons can be punks as kids, but you're a little more like your mother."

"Like the chair incident?" Danny croaked, grinning.

"Yes, the chair incident. That's a good example." Jack scratched the back of his head. "But hey, I turned out alright!"

"What about the lemonade truck?"

"At this rate, we'll be done with my escapades by the end of the month!" Jack sat down on the end of Danny's bed. "And I'm not a good storyteller anyway."

"Did you steal lemonade and sell it to Dave's dad as well?"

"What?" Jack laughed. "Noo... Dave and his folks moved away pretty soon after that; everybody in the town was in on the chair selling secret, even if it couldn't be investigated. And this was a few months before it happened anyway, almost instantly after I started selling pink and yellow spotted socks to pay for my pony..."

"What?" Danny blinked.

"Never mind." Jack sidestepped the question. "At the time, I and usually Vlad were selling some homemade socks at the edge of the town, close to where I lived. We stood behind a makeshift stall at the entrance to this rather unpopular semi-truck pit stop, where drivers often rested in between long journeys and refilled. You wouldn't believe how many of them wanted pink and yellow spotted socks, as well.

"It was the height of summer at this time, so naturally, having always been too disorganised to take any provisions with us, we started looking for ways to keep cool and quench our thirst. I remember sending Vlad into the forest to look for some berries or running water, as the adventure books depicted but after seeing him happily return with a fistful of yew tree seeds, I quickly abandoned that plan.

After another few days in the heat, returning tiredly to our beds every night, we did spy another solution. Every time we arrived in the morning we always caught sight of a truck, packed full of glass lemonade bottles, sitting in the shade of a tree at the far end of the lot. All that kept the goods from falling off was a low wooden barrier, easily climbable, around the edge of the platform. There was little activity during the day, and either the same lemonade truck stayed there for weeks on end or it was a different one each night. We didn't much care which option was right; all we could feel was how thirsty we became in the sun, and how tempting it would be to have at least a little drink of lemonade. So, one day we did."

"How did you and Vlad get up there?" Danny asked.

"I told you," Jack shrugged. "The barrier around it was easily climbable. V-man didn't want to go at first, but I convinced him and together we got up on top of that truck. Hiding ourselves below the fence, we must've opened about twenty boxes and drank litres of their lemonade; as I told you, boy were we thirsty! After that, checking to see that nobody was around, the two of us hopped off of the truck and skipped back to our stall unseen."

"Did anybody notice?" Danny frowned.

"Not for weeks, Danny." Jack answered. "The boxes we opened were replaced with new ones each night, so I assume that it was a different truck every day. Vlad started to come with me and help with selling our socks much more often; he wasn't as keen on the idea of a pony as I was. So this continued, until something strange happened.

One day, in the middle of our lemonade binge, we heard a rather angry man shouting in a foreign language – French, I think - around the truck. Vlad and I went as silent as deer, looking at each other anxiously as the truck's front door slammed. When the engine started, Vlad made a break for it and jumped off of the vehicle, but I was still frozen as the truck emerged out of the lot and began to trundle down the small road, towards our town."

"What did you do?"

"I was pretty scared, son. I didn't want to expose myself to the angry driver with all these empty lemonade boxes, but at the same time I had no idea where the truck was even going and I didn't want to find out. I stood up and held on tightly to the edge, looking for an opportunity to jump if the truck slowed.

However, I think the driver must have seen me when I stood up, because all of a sudden he roughly pulled over, and I fell backwards away from the edge. The man ran to the side and climbed up, grabbing me by my collar.

'You kids!' He was shouting, but at that point he saw some of the destroyed cargo and started muttering what was most likely French swear words. In somewhat broken English, he got out of me where I lived, _left_ me in with the cargo, and started to drive me home."

"That sound awful."

"He was furious at me!" Jack laughed. "For good reason, too; I later found out some of his pay had been deducted for bringing in damaged cargo. But my father was even less pleased at being shouted at by a French truck driver, and it fell to him after all to pay the fines."

"Wow." Danny blinked. "That ended badly."

"Yes, it did." Jack got off the bed with a grin. "It didn't end as badly as the Suicidal Pheasant Crash, though that one was a little less of my fault."

"The Suicidal-" Danny grinned back. "Are you going to tell me that one?"

"Maybe tomorrow. For now, rest up!"


	4. The Pheasant that Never Learned

**Now, this incident actually happened to me, when I was 12-13, first trying to drive a manual car. It wasn't illegal because we were on a field, but the pheasant part did happen to me. Everything else is product of my imagination, and I hope you enjoy! :D**

"So if I have an Uncle Zack," Danny asked the next day, "How come I've never seen him?"

Jack frowned. "Chevy? Oh, I don't want to talk about him. Anyway, what one did I say I was going to tell you today?"

"Did he move away to some obscure place?" Danny pressed. "Did he become an astronaut... or a ghost hunter? Is he a ghost hunter?"

"Son, I told you. I don't want to talk about what happened. It's a real gloomy tale, and even then I'm not a good enough storyteller to do it justice."

"Okay... Well, you were talking about a pheasant, I think."

"Ah, that one!" Jack cracked a smile. "A personal favourite memory of mine...

You see, like me, my father was an inventor. Not ghost weapons, because he didn't believe in them; when I told him once I saw a ghost, he strapped me on the old Fenton Crazy-Be-Gone and spun me round and round until I was green in the face. Instead he focused a lot on cars, a common interest between him and Chevy. I wasn't as into it, but I did really want to start driving, so much so that when I was thirteen, I used to beg my father so much to be taken out into the fields that he decided Chevy could take me out for a spin on my fourteenth birthday."

"That doesn't sound so bad." Danny shrugged.

"Lemme get to the good part." Jack grinned. "You see, as he told me much later, my father had no real intention of letting me drive his car; it was pretty much his third child, with so many of his inventions on it, from self-repair to seat warmers. So, what he'd been working on was a cheap, identical replica of the one he owned, with a lot of the inventions Chev was used to not installed.

So, the day came that my brother and I were to go out to the field. I was so excited, not just to drive but also to spend some time with Chevy. Chevy wasn't so enthusiastic, having to take me out on a day off, so he didn't answer me back a lot on the ride to the field.

When we got there, Chev and I switched sides, and he gave me a basic rundown on how to drive stig. I must've stalled about fifty times; you've never driven a manual, Danny, but if you had, you'd know there's a fine balance between the clutch and the accelerator when you turn it on."

"Can't be much harder than landing a spacecraft." Danny grinned.

"I'm sure it's not, son, but Chev was so impatient that at one point he began to step out of the car... at the exact time I got it started. He was thrown back out of the car and I whizzed forwards; fortunately I had enough sense to slam on the breaks, but Chevy was furious at me.

After that, with my brother staying put in the front seat, I eventually did get the car rolling. I remember cruising around the relatively large field with this massive smile on my face; I felt like such an adult! Of course, I wasn't going too fast, so Chev offered to help me switch it to second gear. Miraculously, it worked without me stalling, and I was going even quicker and having even more fun.

Now, in some other part of the forest, quite close to where our log cabin and this field were, was a pheasant-hunting area. Pheasants, of course, aren't native to Wisconsin but every spring, a new round of them was brought in. That wasn't a good thing for the small dirt roads around the log cabin, because pheasants aren't very smart birds, especially not with cars. My father used to drive up to them, and instead of running to the side, they'd start running away from him, straight down the road at half a mile an hour. It was also illegal to kill them outside of hunting season, so there was that.

Now, as I was driving around, there so happened to be a pheasant running straight at the car. I froze up, leaving Chev to grab the wheel and roughly steer us out of the way, and we avoided it. I continued driving around, but when I went back into that end of the field, it came at us once more, making a beeline for the front wheels.

Chev again took control of the wheel when the pheasant dived in front of me for the second time, and coined the term 'suicidal pheasant'. We had a small laugh about it, but it was the third time that was the problem.

When we saw the pheasant coming at the car for the third time, Chevy, no longer finding the suicidal pheasant nearly as funny as before, pressed a button. It was probably one of my father's inventions, something that would safely diffuse the situation, but as this was not the real car, nothing happened. The pheasant must have just barely passed right under us, because we didn't feel a bump. We frowned at each other for a second before turning our attention back to driving – one second too late."

"Uh oh."

"Yeah, it was pretty bad." Jack grimaced. "We crashed into this thin, tall tree, which broke and fell over onto the opposite field. Both of us were alright except for a little whiplash, but we could see the smoke rising from the bonnet of what the two of us thought was our father's prized car. Shell-shocked, I tried turning the ignition but it was silent- no, it was totalled."

"What did you do?"

"Well, at first my brother started shouting at me. It may have been my father's baby, but that car was pretty important to Chevy as well. Then he went around the front to see if he could possibly fix it, but came back saying that we might as well build it from scratch, so extensive was the damage. Chev and I ended up walking home, where we discovered to our confusion that the same exact car we had just driven into a tree was there, perfectly undamaged.

My father was nearly crying with laughter when he heard our story, but he did make Chev go and pick up the wreck for spare parts."

"Wow." Danny blinked. "So when did you properly learn how to drive stig?"

Jack's voice dropped to a fake whisper. "I'll let you in on a secret, son. The RV's an automatic!"

"Really?" Danny sat up.

"Yeah. I never did get the hang of it." All of a sudden, Jack frowned. "Hey, son, are you sure you need to stay in from school today?"

"What?" Danny quickly lay back down. "I'm still sick... uh, cough, cough!"

"I'll believe you, but you oughta go in Wednesday. Anyway, I'm sure you'll enjoy hearing about the time Vlad and I constructed rafts on the river and I... well, suffice to say, we call it the Backwash Incident."


	5. Ghost of the Past

"Dad?" Danny asked in a perfectly healthy voice, and then they heaved a rather deliberate-sounding cough. "I mean, so are you going to tell me about the Backwash Incident?"

Jack raised an eyebrow, and touched their son's forehead. "Huh. Well, son..."

"Let me guess. Did you go to the beach with Chevy, and he had to save you from drowning or something?"

"No, that's not what happened. But-"

"Who is Chevy, anyway? I'm sorry I keep asking about him, but I never knew I had an uncle! What does he look like now?"

"Ashes." Jack's jaw clenched.

"Huh?"

"Look, Daniel." Jack reached down, picked up a schoolbag and dumped it on the bed. "I don't think you're sick anymore- what was the word? You're malingering. I think you need to get dressed, and go to school."

Danny sat up, surprised. "But-"

"Maddie can drive you. She's finished with the handle, anyway." Jack began walking away.

"What about the story?"

Jack paused at the door. "Not now, son. I'm not in the mood anymore." With that, they left and quickly ran down the stairs and into the kitchen.

There they stopped, by the sink, to catch their breath. Jack's big orange frame nearly reached from one end of the counters to the other as they calmed themselves down.

In, out. In, out. In-

Hey, was that fudge they smelled? Jack looked behind them and saw on the table was an entire plate of the stuff, covered in cling film with a little handwritten note on the top.

One of Jack's black gloved paws peeled off the note and held it in the palm of their hand as they read.

 _Hi honey!_

 _Gone to pick up radioactive samples from Dalveiddam Plants. Will be back by three – if Danny is feeling better, please take to school? Also, take stock on all blaster inventions, I think some ghost has been stealing again._

 _Love Maddie xxx_

 _PS – Whole fudge plate was only $5 at supermarket! After Vday discounts are my favourite part of Vday._

A small, gentle smile nudged up the corners of Jack's mouth; it was hard to imagine how they had ever ended up with such an amazing wife as Maddie.

And with that happy thought, Jack unwrapped the fudge and instantly crammed a piece into their large mouth. They picked up the plate, holding it with one hand and taking pieces at a steady rate as they bumbled merrily downstairs into the basement.

With the portal closed tightly, the room was dark and Jack put the fudge down on a table, fumbling for the light. When they finally located the switch, they turned around, stared at the lab and completely forgot what it was they had come down here for.

So Jack turned the lights back off, skipped up the steps and reread the note; stock taking of the blasters, which was nothing unusual. This job was usually assigned to them as they were the only person who really had any sort of memory as to where the inventions were located.

Shrugging, Jack walked back down to the basement. But this time, something seemed... off about the room. Had a shelf fallen down? Not as far as they could see. Had one of the more quirky prototypes started stinking the place up again? It didn't smell different. In fact, the room seemed just as it was before, yet there was suddenly this unshakable feeling of wrongness Jack felt as he stared around the green-lit room.

Green lit. Jack looked over to the portal and found it had opened up of its own accord, the mesmerising swirl casting an eerie shadow across the room. Frowning, they walked up to it and hit the 'close' button, but nothing happened.

Jack stroked his chin thoughtfully. Perhaps a fuse had blown; a simple task that required little more than a screwdriver and some motivational fudge. It was easy enough to find a screwdriver in the lab, and they then stood up and walked over to where the plate of fudge was.

There had been still a substantial amount of the chocolaty treat when Jack had left it, but to their horror the plate was empty, licked clean of even the tiniest crumb. This could only mean one thing; a ghost had escaped, and a fudge-eating one at that! With an angry shout of 'Ghooost!' Jack picked up the nearest blaster and pointed it wildly around the room.

This rash action was not greeted by some evil ghost stepping out of the shadows, nor by some creeping mass of black tentacles. A dark shadow in the corner baulked and uttered a strangely familiar, high pitched whinny before turning and galloping back into the portal, which closed behind it.

Jack stared after the creature in shock. The blaster slipped out of their hands. The room darkened once more and they were left to their silent, tumultuous thoughts.

Could that creature really have been them? What had it been doing after all of these years? How did it find the lab?

Why did it come back?

"Dad? Dad!" Something from upstairs shook Jack out of their shellshocked trance. "Dad? I need you to take me to school!"

"Wha-?" Jack blinked. "Uh, c-coming, son!"

Danny's face appeared at the top of the stairs. "Hey, why's it so dark in here? You do know that there are lights right here, right?"

"Of course I do, Danny."

"Then why didn't you use them?" Danny backed off a little when their father appeared and closed the door firmly to the basement. "Uh... Are you okay? Your face is kind of pale..."

Jack forced a smile and ruffled their son's dark hair. "I'm perfectly fine, son! Now, let's get you to school..."


End file.
